Monitor what your family eats for a week and use that as a guideline for getting started. The advantage of doing this is you will learn what your family likes so that you can shop accordingly. You would be surprised at how many people can’t remember what they ate yesterday let alone a week ago. Try to write everything down so that you don’t have to rely upon your memory.
More than 500 bunkers for lease are owned by a ranching company that grazes cattle on the land around them in Edgemont, S.D. Robert Vicino's company, The Vivos Group, is trying to lease 575 former military munitions bunkers in southwest South Dakota to doomsday preppers, for use in case of an asteroid strike, a nuclear war or any other catastrophic event. Ryan Hermens, Rapid City Journal
Stored food, even buckets of emergency food, mean you will eat well. But you need fresh food and that is tough to get in emergency situations. Having sprouting seeds on-hand will allow you to grow sprouts with just a little water. This isn’t about growing a garden—it’s about having fresh greens to eat every day. Examples of the types of seeds you can use include mustard seeds, mung beans, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, and lentils.
How many mals can you get from a can of baked beans? You can get 14 servings from a pound of beans. Grains of all types can be cooked like rice hence a pound of grain can give you a weeks worth of meals. Plus you can grind them into flour and make bread or pasta, Beans and whole grain keep almost indefinatly but once ground or cooked (even canned) have alimited shelf life. Just a bit of humble advice.

Your list may be completely different from mine, but I believe the items contained in this list of supplies will be common to most people and more importantly will be required if you are going to be as prepared as possible if the manure hits the hydro-electric powered oscillating air current distribution device. This list is not all-encompassing either. I am probably not going to have blacksmith supplies or leather working tools although I can see the use in each of those. This list is going to be for the average person to get by if we have a SHTF event, not start a new life in the wild west. Please let me know what additional items you would recommend and I’ll keep this list updated so you can print it out whenever you need to purchase items or want to build your supplies out.

As well as tools, stock up on basic supplies. Some plumbing fittings are good to have – pipes, joints and similar items. A couple of spools of electrical cable can be used for repairs or projects, and you can also strip and separate the cores if you need fine wire. Simple light fittings, switches and other components help too. Stock up on timber; 4×2 and plywood have a multitude of uses.
I stored Flour, Sugar (white & Brown) along with yeast, baking soda/powder and crisco. My plan is to use a Bread machine to make bread. I have a large generator to power essential items. I also have a small generator (very quite) to power things during night time hours or my camper that has an oven we could use in an emergency. The best thing you can do now is to sit down and go thru some various scenarios in your head with varying degrees of severity. Then, write it all down on paper in note/bullet statement format. When you’re stressed-out is not the time to formulate a plan.

The EMP/grid down threat has been our biggest concern and the primary focus of our preparedness plan. Learning to live without electricity, or at least practicing from time to time exposes the weaknesses in planning. We get our water from a well, so we plan to use an Emergency Well Tube (www.emergencywelltube.com) if we lose electrical service. We also have manual kitchen appliances and other hand tools to fill-in for the corded ones should the need arise.

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One item you must have is jug or two of plain, unscented, regular bleach and an eye-dropper for precise measurement. Adding one part bleach to nine parts water makes a great disinfectant, but more importantly you can add 16 drops of bleach to a gallon of water to kill germs in an emergency. It has other obvious uses for hygiene, and is too cheap to not have handy for such an occasion. Just keep in mind that bleach has a short shelf life, not the first thing you’d want to stockpile. Get more than one water filter, such as the ones made by Sawyer or Berkey.

Further interest in the survivalist movement peaked in the early 1980s, with Howard Ruff's book How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years and the publication in 1980 of Life After Doomsday by Bruce D. Clayton. Clayton's book, coinciding with a renewed arms race between the United States and Soviet Union, marked a shift in emphasis in preparations made by survivalists away from economic collapse, famine, and energy shortages—which were concerns in the 1970s—to nuclear war. In the early 1980s, science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle was an editor and columnist for Survive, a survivalist magazine, and was influential in the survivalist movement.[17] Ragnar Benson's 1982 book Live Off The Land In The City And Country suggested rural survival retreats as both a preparedness measure and conscious lifestyle change.

When you go back to the last depressing days when we were in a survival mode, the last one the Y2K of course, before the 1970s, what had happened was you only saw this one element of survivalist, you know, the caricature, the guy with the AK-47 heading to the hills with enough ammunition and pork and beans to ride out the storm. This is a very different one from that: you're seeing average people taking smart moves and moving in intelligent directions to prepare for the worst. (...) So survivalism in every way possible. Growing your own, self-sustaining, doing as much as you can to make it as best as you can on your own and it can happen in urban area, sub-urban area or the ex-urbans. And it also means becoming more and more tightly committed to your neighbors, your neighborhood, working together and understanding that we're all in this together and that when we help each other out that's going to be the best way forward.

Expert advice isn’t always as expert as we’d like to believe. There have been many times when I tried to follow how-to advice, only to get frustrated that I can’t seem to do what they did, or I sometimes figure out a more efficient method on my own anyway. This is especially true for the prepper lifestyle. When the internet started exploding with prepper advice a few years ago, most of the bloggers and self-proclaimed experts were learning as they go along with their readers.

“One misconception about prepping is that you’re always thinking there’s going to be some kind of epic disaster,” she told me over the phone from Virginia. “The most common disaster that we prep for, or that happens to us, is a financial problem.” A longtime single mother, Luther said her interest in food storage grew out of a period of “abject poverty” following the 2008 recession. Lisa Bedford, a Texas-based writer who runs the site The Survival Mom, told me she got into disaster preparedness around the same time, when she wasn’t sure if her husband’s construction business would survive the downturn. (Bedford also works as an independent consultant for Thrive Life, meaning that she promotes their products online, and receives a commission on purchases from customers she refers to the company, as well as a discount on products she buys herself.)

What Jennifer, a self-described prepper who declined to share her last name for security reasons, didn’t anticipate was the sheer force of Maria’s rains and 155 mile per hour winds — and how little the storm shutters would do to protect her home. “I was taking water out of the bedrooms, the living rooms, the hallways,” she says. “The house was flooded.” At one point, a piece of debris flew off a neighbor’s roof and got stuck between the outside wall of Jennifer’s pantry and the storm shutters, ripping off a pair of windows in the process.

The first item to go into the stash is the first item to be used up, and then when you head out shopping or running errands you replace the used quantity in the stash. So after eating a can of chili out of your emergency stash, for instance, you would replace the can with another one bought at the grocery. The next oldest can of chili would be the one you draw next time you need chili, and so on. This is known as “rotating” your supplies.
I’ve written in a previous article about beans as survival food. No matter how you look at it, the bottom line is that beans are a superfood. They are high in protein and fiber and other nutrients that can help keep you healthy during an extended crisis. They are excellent foods to feed more than one person since one cup of dry beans makes 2-3 cups of cooked beans (depending on the variety). Once you get to the store, make sure you pick three large bags of beans. To diversify your meals feel free to choose your favorite. One thing to mention is that beans are also proper survival seeds. In case you need to start a garden, you already have some of the seeds waiting for you.
Last thought. I live in a small subdivision, in a small southern town, and a lot of the stuff I mentioned, are very natural to us, because we grew up around it. I can’t even remember the last time I bought a tomato at the grocery store! Our small community established our own disaster plan in an effort that if there was a great catastrophe or crisis, we can block off our subdivision and go straight into “survival mode”…it is not that hard to do, and remember there is always safety in numbers.
Bunkers are either 1,590 or 2,120 square feet, at a cost of $25,000 to lease for 99 years, plus $1,000 annually, and the cost is the same no matter how many residents wind up using the space. One reason the price is so low is because each space is a blank canvas: Each leaseholder is responsible for installing all services and amenities, including plumbing, electricity, air filtration, and exhaust.
This whole discussion was started by JJ who attempted to blame the evils of today on WHITE men who had not matured. Of course, it is immature white men who have abandoned their families. It is immature white men who have dropped out of school and then complain because they can’t get jobs. It is white men who populate the jails and penitentiaries of the country with more of their population than any other race.

I stored Flour, Sugar (white & Brown) along with yeast, baking soda/powder and crisco. My plan is to use a Bread machine to make bread. I have a large generator to power essential items. I also have a small generator (very quite) to power things during night time hours or my camper that has an oven we could use in an emergency. The best thing you can do now is to sit down and go thru some various scenarios in your head with varying degrees of severity. Then, write it all down on paper in note/bullet statement format. When you’re stressed-out is not the time to formulate a plan.

“Everything started flying out,” she says. Buckets and cans rolled out of the pantry and down the side of the mountain. Hurricane Maria claimed almost all the food Jennifer had stockpiled, in addition to more than 30 chickens, two cows, four pigs, six ducks, and a turkey. “I had prepped for two and a half years, and I ended up with preps for six months,” she says.
I would first off go through lists of super-foods, these foods are packed with nutrients. 1 Tablespoon of spiralina powder might have the nutrition equivalence of 2 cups of dried kale/spinach. You have to think about space and weight, as you may end up physically carrying these foods or have limited space. If you are fleeing town, and your car will holds “X” amount of space, you are certainly better off with a light load = use less gas = go farther away from disaster zone.

Cash and Gold/Silver- Cash speaks, and only the direst of calamities will see people forsake the almighty greenback. Assume you will not be able to get any at all, anywhere, after the balloon goes up. Have a good wad hidden away in your stash for a rainy day, and forget about it until it is needed. Don’t raid it for any reason; treat it like the life-saving utility it is.

you need amino fatty acids carbs and meat gives you that. without, you’ll get sick when a shtf senario . get a 55 gal. water drum. kits on amazon. then stock up on food for partriots 25 year shelf life foods. taste great. not like frezze dried. mre’s will kill you, make you sick. buy organic protien/supplement powder shakes. mix them up with fruit jucie. then you will have the protien you need .30grm. in the morning. Ready Store.com. go there and get your food also.

That doesn’t mean that some companies aren’t marketing freeze-dried food as an innovation. After eating the Wise Company meals for three days, I switched to Thrive Life’s Simple Plate program, a Blue Apron–esque service that teaches you how to cook from the company’s store of freeze-dried ingredients, which customers can also get mailed to them in recurring shipments. Unlike Wise Company, Thrive Life’s website makes no mention of emergency preparedness, instead emphasizing the sorts of qualities, like saving money and avoiding waste, that might have appealed to Lydia Maria Child in her time: “These foods won’t spoil in a few days... You won’t be thawing, degreasing, or cutting raw meat. You won’t be chopping veggies or washing and peeling fruit.” I reached out to Thrive Life’s founders to hear more about their rationale for marketing freeze-dried food for everyday use, but didn’t hear back.